Crocker’s rules.
I’m nobody special, and I wouldn’t like the responsibility which comes with being ‘someone’ anyway.
Reading incorrect information can be frustrating, and correcting it can be fun.
My writing is likely provocative because I want my ideas to be challenged.
I may write like a psychopath, but that’s what it takes to write without bias, consider that an argument against rationality.
Finally, beliefs don’t seem to be a measure of knowledge and intelligence alone, but a result of experiences and personality. Whoever claims to be fully truth-seeking is not entirely honest.
I think everything empirical must be real, it just could be distorted. If you have a hallucination about something, the hallucination is real, and it’s content is real just like how a movie is real (that is, the movie exists, but its content did not necessarily take place in real life). The only problem with “I think, therefore I am” is that it supposes an “I”, and that is assumes we know what thinking is. The logic is sound in that, in order for something to be able to hallucinate, something must exist.
I don’t think we can claim that the dream came out of nowhere. It’s like a computer program claiming that the computer it runs on “came out of nowhere”. The computer existed prior to the program, and it will exist after the program finishes executing. The computer is in a higher scope, and the program cannot break outside of itself, nor can the program understand anything outside of its own grammar, for that’s the scope of its existence. A computer program is not a structure which is capable of calculating and holding information, the calculation IS the structure, the information IS the structure. There is only structure. We can only experience ourselves, and we can’t think of anything external because every thought takes place, exists internally. So just like how a thought in your mind cannot break outside of your mind, and a character in a book cannot leave the book, I think it’s arrogant of human beings when their brains decided that the structure they’re embedded inside is wrong or fake. There’s orders of inclusion, scope and chronology which are broken by such assumption.
You assume thoughts have beginnings and ends, and that thoughts therefore aren’t real. But I think thoughts exist physically. A thought contains information, it takes up space, and information must be encoded in something and exist in some location (these are both one). So the only conclusion possible is that thoughts are real, but that we have no way to verify that our thoughts about things outside our thoughts are true. And I will agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a problem.
Also, you think that consciousness may still be real, even if thoughts have beginnings and ends, so you only require the upper layer to be real. This means that the universe may still be real even if human beings have beginnings and ends. You’re only afraid that the uppermost layer is illusion, right? And I suppose you main issue is regarding the agency of the self, and now its realness.
If you take a thing which changes through time, and you model time as a physical dimension, then you have one static four-dimensional object. A DVD is also a static, unchanging object, but you can use one to play a movie, and a movie is visual and auditory information over time. My point about the orbits came from the law “An object in motion stays in motion”, it says “Something which changes over time will change over time in the exact same way forever unless its disturbed from the outside”, and the uppermust layer of the universe is a whole, so there is no external force to disturb it.
Heraclitus is right, but it’s because the entire structure which is life must either never repeat, repeat forever in a huge loop which spans the age of the universe, or have a fractal-like structure. That’s the only possibilities which does not violate “Always changes but has no beginning nor end”. This seems in line with the poincare recurrence theorem and the conservation of energy.
So, that was a lot of words, but it solves all these topics without breaking any fundamental laws, it just requires you to accept that local truths aren’t necessarily global truths. And this should be fine, since I’ve also shown that this doesn’t make the local truth less real.
Yes. But not because I dislike the dream. I’d keep dreaming even if it didn’t improve, for I’d still consider it better than no dream. So to me, destroying the dream would be a loss, not a gain. And, by being both the creator of the dream and the dreamer, it will be my own fault when the dream sucks, and I will have nothing external to blame or complain to.
I’ve experienced the ideal state before, or something similar. But in that state, I didn’t even care if all my friends left me, for I wanted the best for them, and if the best for them was leaving me, I’d consider that good.
When you’re in the state, you do experience it as preferable. But angry people also want to be angry, and depressive thoughts feel correct when you’re depressed, and drunk people rarely think they’ve had too much. You can only really judge a state from the outside, so you need to exit the state in order to judge it. I know I’m doing the opposite when I say that immersion into the moment is good, but this is because I experience life as a work of art, and there’s no wrong or flawed art, so it cannot be judged, only experienced.
I don’t think it’s the dream which is painful, even. It’s the self-torture the brain engages with in order to keep itself alive. For instance, it predicts a large set of bad possible futures, and then feels pain for all of them at once. It doesn’t even map good futures to feel good about. It basically stabs itself in an internal simulation order to motivate itself to avoid being stabbed outside of the simulation.
I think one can learn to use most poisons as medicine, even if it takes time. Human beings, somehow, manage to fight entropy. I think even anxiety is entropy, which is why people relax with music, rocking back and forth, by cleaning, and with rituals. We’re soothed by all entropy-reducing actions. We love order as long as it doesn’t drop so low that we feel trapped and understimulated.
But I think your way of thinking allows for too high complexity. People with downs syndrome live in the same complex world as yourself, but their thoughts are more simple, and from what I can tell, they’re usually quite happy people. Animals, too, are simple, and this lack of complexity does not threaten their survival. How could low IQ, and false knowledge, be a problem? Sharks have literally been around for longer than the north star, and they never discovered rationality.
I think this only happens if one conditions oneself into such a state. If you know without a doubt that relaxation is productive because hard work requires rest, then I don’t think your brain will protect you from wasting time, by protecting you from relaxation (that is, sending you warning signals every time you try to relax)
I think you only need to sit and look at a wall for around 40 minutes before the brain gives up trying to fight again you. The impulses to do something else stops as the brain realizes it cannot force you. I think meditations work the same way, they can’t be too short, as it takes a bit of time for the brain to change the mode that it’s in. But yeah, it will feel very uncomfortable for a while, and 40 minutes is just a guess, it varies between people.
Yeah, thought I wouldn’t call the “I” a facade. It’s real, it’s just not everything. Just like pain is real, even though other emotions and sensations exist, and many other brain circuits exist outside of emotions and sensations. When the elephant and rider is in alignment, it still just feels like I’m in alignment with myself. But this ‘myself’ goes deeper than my identity, persona and ego. I consider my entire body to be me. It doesn’t matter that it’s not. Two seperate people can be on the same wavelength and thus understand eachother, so I can also be on wavelength with myself, even if the components I consider one are actually disconnected. And I have introspective access to the decisions which are made by the brain, so I can usually tell when I’m lying to myself or acting on impulse.
I struggled with this in the past. Then I modeled it as “Neurochemistry is stronger than psychology. You cannot simply think your way to more dopamine”. Then I realized that the release of neurotransmitters are triggered by thoughts and experiences, things that I have access to. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re in a room and everyone likes you—your brain will increase your confidence a little, as long as you don’t accidentally focus on the fact that you don’t believe in what you see. The brain doesn’t really differentiate between the subjective and objective, and between imagined scenarios and real ones. Your reframing will affect perceived reality, and if you make that less threatening, then you will have a more relaxed elephant.
Look at the destination, and that’s where you will end up. The brain is good at navigation. But if you don’t want to act before succeess is guanteed, I suggest reading this phrase every day for a while:
“Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner. Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I will persist until I succeed.”
If you tell yourself “Everything is fine” your mind will object. It should also show you the counter-evidence which caused the objection. As you “argue against yourself”, you should feel the source of the counter-arguments, no? Something like “Here’s a memory where you thought was fine and it wasn’t. Here’s a bad situation which has 4% chance of occuring in the future. Here’s the cognitive dissonance between your statement and how your body feels. Here’s a weak unpleasant emotion associated with the phrase, because you disliked it last time you heard it. Here’s the memory of somebody being nice to you because you didn’t look fine, which taught you that not being fine is valuable”.
You cannot really trick the elephant, unless it believes that you’re tricking it in a way which leads to a better future. But you see, there’s no need to lie to it. For the most part, it just wants you to acknowledge the worries, and to listen to it without dismissing anything. Then you can tell it “I hear your worries, I know it’s hard, but I sincerely belive it’s best for both of us if we do X”
The elephant is intelligent, but the rider can see further. I think they work best as a team. Even if you don’t like my solutions, most of them should lower anxiety, and make it easier to reach enlightenment. Unlearning beliefs which block enlightenment is at least as important as learning more. If you want the conclusion of EST, it has a lot in common with Zen: “both the enlightened and the unenlightened man are totally moving in the world of stimulus-response, stimulus-response, the enlightened man seizes a single space after the stimulus to choose, say “yes” to the response. The response will occur in any case (what is, is), and the enlightened man differs from the unenlightened solely in choosing the response, in choosing what he gets… when he gets it.”